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Salazar on Parks, Arctic Drilling and Clean Energy

By Leslie Kaufman July 17, 2012 1:35 pmJuly 17, 2012 1:35 pm

Visiting New York City for an urban parks conference, Ken Salazar, the secretary of the interior, stopped by The New York Times on Tuesday to discuss the partnership his department has forged with the city on revitalizing parkland around Jamaica Bay.

Associated PressKen Salazar

The National Park Service and the city will collaborate on managing the parkland, knitting communities together along the bay, creating a science center and improving access to the bay’s shores.

Answering questions alongside Jonathan B. Jarvis, the director of the National Park Service, Mr. Salazar also chatted about policy decisions that his department has made on other fronts over the last three years.

Asked about the window of opportunity for Shell’s offshore oil drilling in the Arctic this summer, he said he would made a final decision on whether to issue drilling permits by Aug. 15. While the permits might be issued earlier, he said, the department is still awaiting outstanding tests on equipment including an oil-spill-response barge.
The secretary would not say definitively whether drilling would begin this summer. “We have not yet given the final permits to Shell,” Mr. Salazar said. “We don’t know if it will occur, and if it does occur, it will be done under the most watched program in the history of the United States,” he said, referring to safety precautions.

Environmental groups and others remain concerned about the soundness and the handling of Shell’s retrofitted vessels; only on Saturday, the drilling ship Discovery lost its moorings and drifted alarmingly close to shore in Dutch Harbor, Alaska, before it was reanchored.

More broadly, Mr. Salazar pointed out the Arctic poses serious geopolitical issues related to security and the environment as warming temperatures unlock frozen waters and create competition for natural resources. Beyond the sovereign nations that border the Arctic, China is also in the fray, he acknowledged in response to a question, and “has an ice cutter up there right now.”

The stakes are enormous, he said. “We are at the beginning of deciding the whole future of the Arctic of the earth,” Mr Salazar declared.

Looking back over the Obama administration’s record, the interior secretary cited the promotion of renewable energy as one of its most notable accomplishments after relative stasis in the American wind and solar sectors in the 1980’s and 1990’s.

He warned that those gains could be reversed if the Republicans were to take the election this fall.

“I worry that if the other team wins, you could see a complete U-turn,” he said.

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